Yesterday saw the launch of this nifty little weapon to the ever expanding arsenal of an Analytics Specialist. It’s not a new tool per say, rather an extension to the already existing Google Tag Assistant.

What does it do?

It allows you to instantly validate, tweak and re-check your Google Analytics (and other tags in fact) implementation. With Google Tag Assistant Recordings active you can record the tags, events and interactions for any arbitrary series of pages or even sites that you visit.

You can save these recordings and come back to them at a later date, or better still you can tweak your configuration and then re-run the same recording with a single click of the mouse.

Let’s say you sell bicycle parts online and you want to make sure that your Ecommerce setup is capturing the checkout flow in Google Analytics correctly. Using this new tool you can record yourself going through the checkout process as you buy a new inner tube, and then immediately review what Google Analytics would have captured.

If you find something’s not quite right, let’s say the sale wasn’t recorded or mislabelled slightly, you can make adjustments to your setup and test it all over again instantly. WITHOUT having to run through the whole checkout process again.

How does it work?

You’ll need to already have the Google Tag Assistant Chrome Extension installed. But from there it’s nice and simple as shown in this animated gif:

GIF Source: Google Analytics Blog

HOT TIP: If you do find a problem, and then think you might have fixed it by changing your configuration, you can return to the Google Analytics tab within the Tag Assistant Recordings and click the ‘Update’ button. Hey presto, you’ll instantly see how your configuration changes would have affected this recording.

Why is that cool useful for marketers?

Well, anything that makes it easier to rid ourselves of ‘bad data’ is a good thing in our eyes!

The best part of it, we think, is the Google Analytics Report. There are already plenty of tools available that let you track the tags, events and interactions when browsing particular pages of a site. WASP is normally our go to at Katté & Co.

But the Google Analytics Reports let’s you see what Google Analytics would have recorded. This is where we really see the value. You can make tweaks to your setup (even un-published via Google Tag Manager) and then instantly re-run the same test to see what GA would have tracked this time around, post-tweaking.

 

Need help with your Google Analytics setup? Not sure it’s accurately capturing data? We can help with that…check out our analytics offerings here or just give us a call: 02037 332 893